Assessing Journal Credibility
The credibility of a journal may be assessed by examining several key factors:
- Where is it indexed?
- Is the journal included or indexed in the major bibliographic databases for the field?
- Are its articles discoverable where the journal claims?
- What is its publishing history?
- How long has the journal been available?
- For new journals, is the journal mission clearly available? Who are the members of the editorial board?
- Is it peer-reviewed?
- How long does the peer review process take? Is this a reasonable time frame for a quality assessment?
- What is its impact factor?
- The Impact Factor is a measurement of average citations received over a two year period.
- Does the journal have an impact factor? If not, are other bibliometric measurements available to determine if scholars are reading and citing articles from this journal?